Rethinking Search Results from a UX Perspective

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Rethinking Search Results
from the Users’
Perspective
Brian Frank | @brian_frank
UX Researcher at Res.im
#PSEWeb 2018

About Me
Full-time UX researcher at Res.im since 2015
50% of my time is on post-secondary/higher-ed projects
Experience sp...

Everyone uses search. Some people prefer
to search. Others resort to it at critical
moments — often when they’re already
f...

Search is usually one of the most prevalent
complaints.
Many frequent users avoid it completely by
doing external searches...

Why is Search Stuck?

Technology-ﬁrst approaches. Site search is
easy to do adequately (sort of) with CMS
defaults and other solutions.
Law of t...

5/5 test participants
easily found search on
this homepage.

5/5 test participants
easily typed a search
query…

2/5 test participants took more than 1
minute to ﬁnd a student residence page.
Only 1 participant found it quickly.

Design effort and stakeholder input is
usually focused here…
… but the biggest problems are
often here.

Phase One: Understand Users

1. Review site search data.
2. Map site search user flows.
3. Interview and observe users to test your
assumptions.

Review site search data.
Review the top 100+ search terms during the past year (at least).
Consider segmenting by month, l...

Map site search user flows.
Categorize search types based on search terms and contexts, e.g.
“program discovery,” “student...

Interview and observe users to test
assumptions.
Interview and test with a cross section of users/personas.
Combine open-e...

Phase Two: Cover the Basics

1. Clean up and organize your content.
2. Leverage your current search features.
3. Style search results like the rest of ...

Clean up and organize your content.
Remove outdated or redundant content.
Fix content structure: titles, headings, metadat...

Leverage your current search features.
Prioritize more important and popular types of content.
Set up synonyms, spelling v...

Style search results like the rest of the site.
Use consistent colours and fonts.
Have sufﬁcient white space for keywords ...

Phase Three: Explore Improvements

• Featured Results
• Grouped Results
• Redirects
• Autosuggested Queries
• Sublinks
• Contextual Advanced Search

Featured Results

Manually promoting results can be a
relatively easy way to mitigate irrelevant
search results.
Elements outside the main r...

0/5 usability test participants noticed the
featured results.
Everyone focused on the
main list of results.

Grouped Results

Grouped results reveal the site’s breadth
and depth of content.
Users often don't know what the names of
facets or scopes ...

Autosuggested Queries

Autosuggestions are great shortcuts and
hints to help people avoid errors and ﬁnd or
discover things more efﬁciently.
Many...

Think of site search as navigation by
keyword, not a “data dump.”
Search results pages are often worse than
other pages at...

All of the
relevant
links are on
this page…
Plus some
useful links
that weren’t on
the ﬁrst page
of search
results…
… and ...

Make key pages easy to scan for relevant
keywords.
Program and course code queries can
redirect as a shortcut for frequent...

Sublinks in Results

Contextualized Advanced Search

Advanced search helps users target or
reﬁne queries.
Generic advanced search pages overwhelm
most users with too many opti...

Tailor advanced search features to speciﬁc
contexts or types of search.
Filtering and sorting options have become
standard...

• Scoped Search
• Natural Language Queries

Scoped search helps users focus, and
helps us tailor the experience with special
ﬁlters, features, etc.
Users often don't ...

Natural Language Queries

“Natural language” is not a natural way to
use site search.
Natural language makes sense when starting with less context, ...

Chat is a better place to integrate natural-
language results or suggestions.
Unlike site search, users expect to use natu...

Take a user-driven, not technology-driven
approach to improvement.
Test changes with users — because small
things make big...

Thank you.
Email brian@res.im
Twitter @brian_frank
LinkedIn /brnfrnk

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